My son, Ben, enjoys Pokemon and loves
science (he plans to become a paleontologist), so he made up a version
of Pokemon cards with real living things, with animals and plants and
"attacks" that let you learn about the natural world.

He started with 100% hand-written and hand-drawn cards, and we've now
progressed to making cards using Powerpoint and images loaded off the
Web. Google's image search
turns out to be really useful for this. (It's also got an automatic
"mature content" filter to keep the images you get back safe for
kids.)

In Powerpoint, go to the "Print" menu. Under
"Print what?" select 'handouts', and under "Slides per page"
select 6.

You'll get cards that are a good size for cutting out and
gluing/taping onto standard 3x5" index cards.

Play with the cards however you'd like! Ben's version of the
game involves taking turns where one person puts out an organism
card and the other person plays an attack. You subtract the
attack points from the organism's hit points (HP), and when
the HP reaches zero the card is "out".

Please write to me at resnik@glue.umd.edu
with the correction and a pointer to where you got the information.
We want these cards to be scientifically accurate. Note, though, that
there's plenty of room for creativity in strengths, weaknesses, and
attacks. For example, Ben decided to make the giraffe's weakness
"lightning" because it's so tall!

You should e-mail me a Powerpoint (.ppt) file as an attachment,
and it has to have at least twelve (12) new cards in it.
Otherwise I'll spend all day doing this stuff and not get any work
done!

In your message, you should include your name, your age, and
where you come from, so I can give you credit. Feel free to
give me a funny or interesting title for your deck.

From what I can see, kids like to make animal cards (kingdom metazoa)
more often than they make cards from kingdoms chromista (kelps,
diatoms, haptophytes), fungi (fungi), plantae (plants), or protista
(protists). So you deserve extra applause if you add cards from these
other four kingdoms. (Plus, they contain really interesting
things!)